HOW CAN WE SECURE OUR DATA ON FACEBOOK?

Facebook was recently in the news,for being a part of a data leak scandal. Before the September 2007 only facebook members could search on facebook for other users. But Now, non-members will be able to search. Further all major search engines will index the public search listings. You can shows the limited amount of your account information such as name, profile picture and friends. And the information was exposed without the explicit permission of FB user.
A recent revelation uncovered a data analysis company, Cambridge Analytica gathered information of around 50 million Facebook clients without their permission. This should give you an idea of easy it is for apps and services to access your data. All it takes is a click. While Facebook isn’t directly responsible for this, their standard of user security is under a lot scrutiny. If this has got you worried about your online presence on the popular social media site, there may be no guarantee that your data is ever really private, but these steps can help you protect your personal information.

Some Basic Tips for make your Facebook account safer:

1. Make sure only your friends can see your profile:

Click on the down arrow key at the right-top corner, then select ‘Settings’ from the tab.

Click on the privacy setting option: You are now in the Privacy Settings and Tools area of Facebook. From here you can control, Who can see your future posts? By editing ‘Who can see your future posts?’ you will be able to choose exactly who gets to see your future updates.

Choose from:

Public (means everyone),

Friends,

Only you,

Custom (which allows you to limit some of your friends from seeing your posts),

Friends except (Don’t show specific friends),

Specific friends(show specific friends).

Pick any one what’s best for you, but make sure public isn’t selected. Whatever you choose will then become the default every time you post an update.

2. Control who can contact you on Facebook:

The second part of the Privacy Settings and Tools section allows you to select who can contact you.

Who can send you friend request? (In this option you can control on who can send you friend request)

Who can see your friends list? (In this option you can control on who can see you friend request) Remember that your friends control who can see their friendships on their own timelines. If people can see your friendship on another timeline, they’ll be able to see it in News Feed, search and other places on Facebook. If you set this to Only me, only you will be able to see your full friends list on your timeline. Other people will only see mutual friends.

Who can look you up using the email address you provided?(In this option you can control on who can see you email address on your profile)

Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?(This applies to people who can’t see your phone number on your profile.)

Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your Profile? (This option is for the indexing your profile on search engine like google, yahoo, bing. When this setting is off, search engines will stop linking to your Profile, but this may take some time. Your Profile can still be found on Facebook if people search for your name.)

Securing your data from apps:

You might be tempted to install games and other apps that are available through Facebook, but doing so allows those apps to tap into your personal data, including your name, profile picture, gender, networks, username, friends list and other public information. You’ll be surprised by the amount of information you’ve been giving out by simply pressing the, ‘Sign in with Facebook’ button. There might not be an easy way to retrieve the data these apps and services have gained from you already, but there is way to keep it in check, thanks to Facebook’s privacy settings. Here are some steps that could help secure data from these apps.

You can edit the permission given to the app by clicking on the edit(pencil) button:

Securing data for ads

Despite the fact that securing your information through applications is the significant part, when you are searching hotel websites, than you’re probably going to find an ad from hotels. You Can change it by going in the settings option again, and clicking on Ads tab.

Start off with ‘Ad settings’. First thing you do is disable, ‘Ads based on your website’ and ‘Ads on apps and websites off of the Facebook Companies’. This should prevent you from being bombarded by most of the ads that are thrown at you, based on the web sites you visit. It will also stop you from getting these ads cross the devices you use. Note that you’re not going to be free of ads completely by doing this. But most ads will be thrown at you at random. Now head over to ‘Your interest’. These are ads that you get based on a pages you’ve liked, topics you’ve shown interest in, or even on ads that you might have previously clicked on. The best thing to do here is to get rid of any topics that do not interest you, by simply clicking on ‘Remove’ button placed at the top-right corner of each topic.